


Press Ganged

by lost_spook



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Press Gang
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor seems to think Lynda's newsroom is some sort of companion academy.  He couldn't be more wrong...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Press Ganged

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt from justice_turtle on LJ.

**One: Colin**

The police box vanished from the newsroom, leaving behind it a grating echo and a dejected Colin, who now slumped into the nearest chair. It had looked, Lynda thought, as though he had been pushed out of the thing by force. Which was a perfectly reasonable reaction to Colin, as far as she was concerned.

“So. It didn’t go well?”

Colin sank further down the chair and gave a muffled groan. “Remember the date with Julie? And that school trip to the zoo?”

Lynda stopped. “Colin. You didn’t kill somebody’s pets, did you?”

“Worse,” he said, and muttering something else under his breath.

She frowned. “Did you say ‘interplanetary war’?”

“Was it my fault?” he said, looking up. “I mean, those Dalek thingies – aggressive or what? And I offered them that deal with the second hand sink plungers in good faith. You know me, Lynda. Would I ever sell even my worst enemy shoddy third-rate goods _knowingly_?”

“I’m going to assume that was a rhetorical question, but if not I’ve got the list in a drawer – if you’ve got an hour or so to spare.”

“Even if the ends _did_ drop off, they didn’t have to start blaming those giant squids. I mean, I might have said something, but – aliens were pointing weapons at me! And you know I’ve got an unnaturally low fear threshold. Besides, that trouble with those metal men that didn’t take to the nail varnish remover wasn’t my fault, not exactly, anyway -”

“Colin -” 

“There was this accident with the orange nail varnish, right, so obviously, I stepped into the market gap with the remover and next thing you know, everybody’s blaming everybody else and trying to kill me.” He hid his head in his hands. “It was horrible, Lynda, horrible. Planets exploding all over the place and suddenly it’s the end of the universe!”

“End of the -? Colin!”

“He’s going to fix it, he said,” Colin added, with another sigh. “He just muttered something about it being safer to take me back where I belonged first. He said it was that, or he’d have to kill me.”

Lynda reviewed all this, and decided there was only one thing to say, since she’d have to hope the Doctor knew what he was talking about when it came to saving the universe from exposure to Colin. What she had to do was restore her financial manager to what passed for normal around here. 

“Just as well,” she said, marching back over to her desk. “We need some more advertising on page four, and you haven’t shown me the account books this week. In fact, you haven’t shown me the accounts for the past two and a half months. Being abducted by an annoying and over-talkative alien is no excuse for sloppy work – even if you did nearly destroy the entire cosmos. Tough. That’s not _my_ problem, is it?”

Would you believe me if I said he abducted the account books, too?”

“Colin!”

“In fact, I’m pretty sure one of the giant squids _ate_ them…”

***

**Two: Frazz**

“Do you think you could stop abducting members of my news team now?” said Lynda. “They have got work to do. And if you must, then why you had to bring Frazz _back_ -”

The Doctor stuck his hands in his pockets and balanced on his heels. “Well, yeah, he wasn’t much trouble, but he wasn’t much use, either.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’d have brought him back sooner, but he seemed to be enjoying it. Or – I don’t know, but he kept picking up newspapers as a souvenir…”

*

“Frazz,” said Lynda, arriving at his desk. “Hand them over.”

He looked up slowly from behind his copy of the Gazette. “Lynda?”

“Papers from the future. I know I asked you to make sure the horoscopes were more realistic, but that wasn’t what I had in mind!” She held out her hand, and glared. “ _Now_ , Frazz!”

It was a fair cop. Frazz pulled them out from the nearest drawer and passed them to her with a resigned expression.

Lynda took them from him, and marched away without another word. He slunk back behind the paper, before she returned, puzzled this time.

“Wait. You kept the _horoscopes_?”

“Yep.”

“From 1913, 2005, 2080, and – Is this even from this planet? – 30,012?”

“Yep.”

“You _only_ kept the horoscopes?”

“I thought it’d save some work.”

Lynda handed them back. “So… it didn’t occur to you to keep the _news_ section and make accurate predictions?”

Frazz gave her his trademark terminally confused look.

Lynda turned away. “Just don’t use the one from 30,000 – I think people’ll spot something odd if we tell them they’re due for a change, so why not buy a new hyperdrive and move planets, or at least redecorate the dome.” She paused, and reflected on the week Frazz had predicted a plague of purple elephants at work for Aries. And then there was a time in their early days when they’d run the sports results for the following week based on the outcome of a subbuteo game. “Well, only if it’s that sort of week. And I don’t want to know about it. Okay?”

Frazz shrugged to himself as she went. Predicting the future sounded like a thing that could get him into trouble. As it was, he didn’t have to think of horoscopes for the next eight weeks, which was good enough for him. Anyway, wasn’t accurately predicting horoscopes from the future pretty impressive, anyway? How many people could do that?

***

**Three: Julie (and Spike & Lynda)**

“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” said Lynda.

The Doctor ran his hands through his hair. “No-o. True. You did. I just thought you were exaggerating.”

Lynda gave him a dark look. 

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Julie said, folding her arms and scowling at them both. “Can’t a girl ask a guy out in the Thirty-Second Century?”

“A guy, yes,” said the Doctor, spinning round to face her. “A girl even. A blobby purple three-armed wotsit, if you like. I’ve got no problem with that. But _not_ the Sontaran Leader when I’m trying to defeat his army! With a cunning plan, no less.”

Lynda raised her eyebrows.

“He had something about him,” Julie said, her expression dreamy.

“He looked like an oversized potato, like all the rest of them!”

“Isn’t that racist?” asked Lynda.

The Doctor turned. “No, no. They’re clones. They’re supposed to look alike. Although, come to think of it, they often don’t. Maybe you get different varieties – some are King Edwards, others are more your Maris Pipers?”

“Well, congratulations,” said Julie. “You ruined the relationship all right. Anyway, I stopped him shooting you, didn’t I? Don’t I even get credit for that?”

“We-ell,” the Doctor said, shifting about. “Er. Yeah. If you want to put it like that. He was definitely shocked when you got in there and snogged him. So was I!”

“He reminded me of that rugby forward I used to date -.” Julie frowned. “Jack. Or was that Bill?”

“I mean, I need warnings if my companion’s suddenly going to start kissing the enemy.”

“Oh, I’m _sorry_ ,” snapped Julie. “I didn’t know it was a crime. You should have said.”

“It’s going to be in the rules from now on, yes. Top of the list.”

“Well, you made his _head_ explode!”

“Okay,” said Lynda, stepping in. “Temporary loan of my assistant editor is over. She’s got work to do. Now, get out of my newsroom, loser.”

The Doctor paused and gave her his best appealing look. “ _You_ could come with me.”

“Do I look like someone who’s got nothing better to do than traipse about time and space with a lunatic who destroys root vegetable-based life-forms for a living? I’ve got the next edition to finish – and it’s running behind schedule because some alien with stupid hair keeps abducting my staff. Go away!”

“Right,” said the Doctor. “Yep. So that’s a no, then?”

***

**Epilogue: Spike & Lynda**

*

“So,” said Lynda, following the Doctor into the TARDIS. “What part of ‘no’ did you take to mean you should kidnap my boyfriend, abandon him on a hostile alien planet and then get me to come and help you rescue him?”

The Doctor grinned at her. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“I’ll let you know,” said Lynda, darkly. “We haven’t got Spike back yet…”

***


End file.
